Building a Campaign World: Part Two Mapping
When it comes to building maps for a campaign world, you won’t find any better tools than those at ProFantasy. The price tag is hefty, but the tools there will help you build great looking maps that can be linked together. Of special note are the product bundles which offer some appreciable discounts.
If you want to take advantage of the map making power in the ProFantasy tools but don’t want to invest a lot money take a look at their map catalog. These can provide you the detailed map you want, and with a little clever photoshopping the names and descriptions can be adapted to display whatever you want, leaving the geographic maps in place.
Dundjinni is a great alternative to ProFantasy at only $39.95. Offering one software package, there is some great functionality in Dundjinni that’s lacking from ProFantasy - Dundjinni comes with built in creature stats from many different games, making adventure authoring much simpler. You can find a complete list of features for Dundjinni here.
AutoREALM is a free GNU program designed to map out castles, cities, dungeons and overland views. While AutoREALM lacks some of the features and powers of the more costly alternatives, its a great program to give you some power without spending any money.
Intense control and expert maps can be made with software like Photoshop and Corel Draw, but this is far from my field of expertise. If you are interested in making professional quality maps with this kind of software, I highly recommend this guide, which comes complete with pictures and examples.
RPG Map Share is an online community dedicated to sharing maps of different levels of detail, as other visual aids for games. This is a great place to check for pre-made maps, as well as to upload your own creations for other people to enjoy and use.
If you’re looking for more free options, check out iG-Tools map section. The first section will provide you with several hundred pre-made maps, while the following section provides some online interactive map makers which are labeled as experimental.
Games which take place in modern day Earth can take advantage of tools like Google Maps for not just the overland maps, but the map to be used on the fly during game play. During a d20 zombie game set in modern day New York, we once set up a laptop at the game table which allowed us to look at close ups of New York City and see exactly what our characters saw - buildings, streets, alleys - things which wouldn’t show up on normal topographical maps but are of extreme importance.
In another game I played in, the world bore a striking resemblance to Greyhawk in terms of geography. In fact, the game master had copied the Greyhawk map out of the book, re-labeled everything and adapted it all to his game, and proceeded to use it for a long-term campaign. This worked beautifully for him, issues of similarity between his world and Greyhawk never once cropping up.
Invisible walls are something that have been used in video game maps for years to great effect. The name comes from a literal invisible wall which would be placed in 3D video games to limit the playing field while still making it appear vast and open ended. Invisible walls can be subtle while remaining just as effective.
Grand Theft Auto 3, a game famous and popular for it’s open world nature, brilliantly employs the use of visible walls to limit the area the player moves around in at the beginning of the game. The bridge being out stops any player from advancing too far too quickly, while also relating itself to the game’s story. This is an invisible wall of practicality - a virtual wall that is formed by circumstances to achieve the same effect.
The same thing can be done in your own map making and world building. Long stretches of harsh terrain, beset by either temperature extremes or impassable nature, such as a near endless ocean or a high-altitude mountain range. Storms and other weather events can also be used as excellent invisibles walls.
Invisible walls can also be made out of living creatures. A classic example of this is the beast guarding the bridge, requiring tribute in the form of goods or information before anyone could pass. In Lord of the Rings, Moria was filled with invisible walls in the form of the trolls and orcs as well as the balrog.
Used carefully, invisible walls can limit the movement of players while you continue building the world and prepare the next stage for them.
One final and optional thing to consider when creating maps for your world, and especially when presenting them to players, is that since the maps are most likely being created entirely on a two dimensional surface, which means that there will be some distortion in terms of shape and size.
To gain an idea of how big an effect these distortions can have, they are the reason that on Mercator maps Greenland looks bigger than South America. For a quick overview on map distortions and examples of the different kinds, see this Map Projection Overview.
Do you know of any map tools, tutorials or techniques I didn’t mention here? Share them in the comments!
Building a Campaign World: Part One
The first step in building any campaign world is preparation and evaluation.
Key questions to ask yourself before beginning:
- How much time am I willing to invest?
- How much energy am I willing to invest?
- How much money am I willing to invest?
- What resources do I already have?
- Is there a deadline?
- Who will play in it, and what do they want out of it?
- What am I building the campaign world for?
The first five questions are designed to determine how big a task you are willing to tackle. The sixth question is to establish who you are building the world for, and what they want out the setting. It’s a terrible disappointment to find out that a player is only interested in a sword and sorcery setting or games that involve a lot of intrigue after spending weeks building a setting for a pulp action game.
The last question attempts to determine how big the task in front of you is. If you are a building a campaign world to host a single campaign, then you are able to create a smaller and more linear world for the game to take place in. If, however, you are creating a campaign world to host a number of campaigns, adventures, and characters over a longer time span, then you’re looking at a much more complex task.
When examining what resources you already have, pay particular attention to your existing game materials. Go through your old game supplies and look for software, charts, maps, organizations and NPCs. Make mental or physicals notes of where different materials exist for future reference. For example, if you happen to have the old TSR Core Rules CD for Second Edition DnD, you have two map makers: one that is proprietary and rather simple, as well as the more complex and intricate Campaign Cartographer 2.
Tomorrow, I will discuss building maps for the campaign world.
Drama Moments
Drama moments are an aspect of a house rule that you’ve probably used or witnessed at least once in your gaming career, though you may not have known it.
Drama moments are those moments in a game where all the rules are thrown out or bent for a moment so that, in a moment of GM Fiat, the right thing can happen. Drama moments are often employed to match excellent role-playing, to ensure that the story continues on the right path or that the story ends on the right note and in general to ensure that the over-all enjoyment isn’t compromised.
Some examples of drama moments include:
- A character casting a spell they do not know or do not have access to
- A character taking extra actions
- A character shrugs off damage
- A character automatically accomplishes something that normally requires dice to be rolled
- A character over-comes a powerful magical effect
But why include drama moments when GM Fiat is generally considered a bad thing? Drama moments are not random or in place solely to gratify one individual - they serve the story and the communal enjoyment of the game.
If you’re not sure if a given situation is appropriate for a drama moment, ask yourself the following questions:
- If the wrong thing happens, can the game still be fun?
- Does it affect the entire group?
- Can the game/story continue if the wrong thing happens?
- Can they try again?
- If the wrong thing happens, does that prevent the right thing from happening later?
- Is the wrong thing primarily left up to chance?
If the answer to most or all of these questions is yes, then you’ve most likely encountered a drama moment where GM Fiat is acceptable.
Some things to keep in mind with drama moments:
Try not to let the player’s know it’s happening. By keeping it hidden, the players enjoy it more because it feels natural to them. If the situation would normally call for dice to be rolled, roll them behind your screen so that players cannot see them.
Make the players feel responsible. If you’re ensuring that an unlikely turn of events plays out in the game, present the players with something they can do to “improve the odds.” By doing so and having the players do this, they will not only feel more responsible for the events, but they will be more accepting of the unlikely turn of events because they “made [the events] likely.”
Have a reason handy as to how and why things worked differently. If the player accessed an unusual level of magical abilities, a new source of magical power that was tapped and run dry during the drama moment is sufficient to explain what happened. Similarly, outside intervention, luck, favor of the gods, adrenaline are all acceptable excuses.
Remember, the worst thing that can happen from a drama moment is the players trying to futilely to re-create the circumstances or accomplish the same phenomenal task.
When A Player Doesn’t Like Their Character
From time to time, a player will be unsatisfied with the way their character is working out. Perhaps they made an error when building the character, or made a decision which is closing off possibilities now. May-be the character doesn’t fit in with the party, or the story-line for that matter. Perhaps the opportunities to contribute are too few and too far in between. Whatever the reason for it, the situation is always best dealt with directly. But how?
Kill the character.
Killing the character allows the player to immediately roll a new character and re-enter play with one that is more appropriate to the situation. Character deaths which preclude resurrection may often be the best, as many groups would try to revive their fallen comrade.
If the character is going to be killed off, it is best if the death means something - it allows the character to accomplish something in its time and not feel like a waste. The character sacrificing themselves so that the rest of the group can safely escape a situation is a classic example of how to accomplish this.
Write-Out the character.
Less drastic than killing off a character and just as effective, writing the character out of the story for a length of time allows the character to continue to exist, and perhaps be played again in the future. This option can be best if the character is not critically flawed so much as inappropriate to the current game for whatever reason.
Re-build the character.
If a character doesn’t fit in with the group or setting, it may be best to change the character so that it does fit better. Allowing the player to re-build the character, within limitations chosen by the game master, lets them continue using the character in the game but fix whatever the problem with the character is.
The PHB II spends an entire chapter discussing how to accomplish this and what can be used in game as an explanation for the change - usually a magical effect achieved at the end of a quest or from thorough training. I tend to choose the latter for minor changes - in my Dark Matter game, the players are allowed to rebuild their characters between missions; there is ample time and the Hoffman Institute provides the necessary instruction.
Change the Story.
When a character doesn’t fit in with the story or the group, it can be easy to focus in on the character as the problem and by extension as the solution. But sometimes the best solution can be to make changes to the story/campaign/game world. Look at the situation and see if there is something you can do to make the situation fit the character more neatly. Often minor changes can yield great results. A player is also likely to be more open to making the changes you want to their character if they see that you have already explored this option.
What do you do when a player doesn’t like their character?
Evaluating Your Game: Part Four
This is part four in an ongoing series, designed to help you evaluate and improve your game from the ground up. Previously, I discussed Genre, Setting, and Scope, followed by an analysis of Character Generation Methods and The Role of Randomness.
In most RPGs, you will eventually encounter something in character advancement that has a pre-requisite - something you must already have to be able to qualify for the advancement. These will typically apply to traits, classes, and occasionally skills.
Pre-requisites are good because they serve the function of providing a barrier between who may use something and who may not. This may be because of a concern with specialization, such as with d20’s prestige classes, or because the system does not implement a point-buy advancement and there is a desire to make somethings more costly, as with d20’s feat system.
The first concern with using pre-requisites is that it may make things too costly for a player to pursue - the Whirlwind Attack feat being an ideal example, it is highly desirable but almost never pursued because of the litany of pre-requisites.
The second concern with using pre-requisites is that they can go against a character concept. The Whirlwind Attack feat is another perfect example of this - among it’s pre-requisites are three defensive feats, one of them (Combat Expertise) will never see use if it was taken only because of the pre-requisites. Players will most likely try to avoid this wasted space on their character sheets.
There are one of two solutions to this problem:
First, you may offer alternate pre-requisites, a different path that can accommodate different concepts so that they may access the same thing.
Second, you may create an alternative to what the pre-requisites originally guarded - the alternative would represent the same skills if they were lacking whatever pre-requisites were not included and augmented by whatever they were replaced by. In the case of Whirlwind Attack, a version which did not include the defensive feats might provoke Attacks of Opportunity.
The use of pre-requisites is a balancing act - you must be sure that the requirements do not outweigh the perceived benefits, and that the requirements of a feature will appeal to everyone that would be interested in that feature.
Campaign Website
A few months ago, I posted an article about building a campaign website to keep track of your game’s story, characters, and other various elements.
One of the most difficult parts of building a website like this is finding hosting and getting the necessary software set up on the server - wikis are obviously the best but they are also difficult to deal with.
Micah from ObsidianPortal.com got in touch with me recently to let me know about the website - which provided a free automated hosting space for people to use as a campaign website.
Some of the basic features include an NPC, Item and DM wiki, making it easy to make changes on the website and keep track of events, characters and items. In addition to the campaign management features, the website makes it easy to publish your campaign or keep it private - you can even use the website to hunt out new players, based on geographic location or other search parameters.
If you’re looking for a simple solution to handle your campaign website, check out Obsidian Portal - if you don’t need anything other than the basics described above, it’ll certainly meet your needs.
Is there any other software or websites that make this process easier that you take advantage of?
Ending a Campaign
Just before the holidays, I was finally able to draw a three year campaign to a close. This was a challenge to both me and my players, as this was the first campaign of mine to reach a close. Here are two things I learned from running the session.
Prepare a quick ending. When we started the session, the general understanding was that we had two or three more sessions in which to conclude the game, and the pacing of the game was set up to mirror this. Unfortunately, this was only the result of poor communication, as one player could not return after this session due to an imminent relocation to another state. This coupled with a player’s significant other having severe car trouble, and we were left with two hours in which to conclude a three year campaign which I had planned on spending another two nights on.
As a result of all this, the game was most certainly rushed, scenes were skipped and some mysteries went unsolved during the game. Worst yet, there were two prophecies hanging over the game, one much more recent and naming a lot more events and entities, albeit very vaguely. This second prophecy gave me another five or six events which I had to pull to a close quickly. For each of these events, if I had prepared an alternate event which could have taken its place, my job would have been much easier.
It’s important to have a quick ending prepared not only in case the schedule suddenly shifts, but in case the game itself does. For many experienced game masters, it isn’t a terrible problem when a campaign takes a strange turn, as there is always time left in the future to get things back on track or adjust for the sudden shift. With the end of the game approaching, however, this is not always the case.
The key question to determining if something needs a quick way to end it is “Will the game be worse off if this isn’t resolved before it ends?” If the answer is yes, then be sure to prepare something. If the answer is no, then there is no harm in sweeping it under the rug (or behind the screen for that matter.)
Prepare an alternate ending.
There was a point prior to the end of the campaign where the party (thanks to a Deck of Many Things) was nearly wiped out. If not for a remarkable stroke of luck, the party would have been dead and the campaign over with no even remotely reasonable way out of it. If a situation like this crops up and you are unprepared, it can be devastating. With proper preparation, it can be made into a great plot hook and even a new campaign.
For instance, let us say the goal of a campaign is to stop a demon overlord from coming through a portal and beginning the apocalypse, and the players, for some reason or another, fail at this. The demon overlord comes through the portal and triggers the apocalypse, as well as several options for a follow-up campaign. Perhaps the next campaign will take place in this post-apocalyptic world, or perhaps it will continue the fight on the other side of the portal, rebelling against the demon overlord. Perhaps fighting the apocalypse is useless, and the next campaign is focused around trying to survive during the apocalypse itself.
Being prepared for the campaign to end differently allows you to not only set the stage properly for these events, but make the failure something more: a tragedy.
Get positive feedback. Ending a campaign is very draining and tiring, as well as the culmination of a lot of work. While it might not normally be your practice to make your players offer feedback, now is an appropriate time to do so. After the session is over, grab some limelight for yourself and enjoy it as your players tell you about how they enjoyed the game.
How do you end a campaign?
Five Ways to Improve Your Game
A few days ago, Yax wrote on article on several ways to improve a DnD game.
Remove every distraction possible. It’s universally agreed upon that distractions and disruptions in any game not only makes the game less enjoyable by itself, but also removes people from the game and causing the quality of the game to suffer for a time after the distraction/disruption ends. Turn off cell phones, shut down instant messaging clients, and hang a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door if needed.
Whenever any situation comes up in the game where you feel something has provoked a character, or you would like it to, ask the player to share the reaction with the group. This encourages character immersion and does a lot to set the mood by having players describe how their characters feel.
If the party splits up, if at all possible, keep everyone at the table, or at least in the same room. Making players stop playing for a time in the middle of a session breaks the flow of everything, and results in boredom. If possible, have the players stay in the room so that they can listen. You may also want to consider having a small project for them, such as having them write up notes about the game, or write a character journal entry relating to something. A small reward for the player encourages them to do this, and doesn’t remove them from the game.
Exaggerate NPC characteristics. I don’t mean you should do this to a ridiculous degree, but times where I have exaggerated NPC characteristics to make them particularly noticeable, annoying or endearing, my players have never thought I was exaggerating the characteristics. It may seem over the top when presented, but rarely when it is received - especially if you don’t happen to be an actor.
Recognize that the story being told may well be bigger than the characters which the game focuses on. By making this apparent to your players while keeping the main focus on them, you add a lot to the feeling that they are making a difference, and that what their characters do actually matters.
Game Weather
Weather in RPGs is one of the most overlooked and simplest way to add flavor and attitude to a game. Because weather rarely comes into play as far as logistics goes, it often goes ignored. In the last four years, the only time I have heard players ask about the status of weather, it was because they were wondering if they could use a storm or wind based spell that required certain weather conditions.
How do you create weather in RPGs that is realistic, interesting and doesn’t come across as repetitive? Go outside on a regular basis during different times of day and write down whatever weather patterns are presenting themselves. Learn the conditions when dew turns into a misty fog in the early morning, or whatever else you can gleam. Use these descriptions to create a scene for your players to imagine in their heads.
For instance, here is a description of adventurers waking up in the woods without weather being part of the description:
The last watch shift ends at dawn, and you begin breaking down the campsite and hiding any record of your presence lest you be tracked. Calls of wild-life emanate from within the forest.
Compare this to a description of the same scene with weather included as a factor:
The last watch shift ends at dawn, and you begin breaking down the campsite and hiding any record of your presence lest you be tracked. A low fog rolls over the ground, forcing you to go up a tree in order to scout the surrounding area and get your bearings. Looking out over the forest, many patches are filled with an obscuring mist. Calls of wild-life emanate from beyond the mists, reminding you of how little you see of what’s around you.
These scenes are essentially the same as far as any mechanics go, and there may or may not be an ambush or other peril waiting for them within the fog. The image of it, however, is quite evocative and sets a mood for the players. Encouraging them to imagine the scene allows them to create an image of it in their minds, forcing them to interact with the game and become more immersed in it.
How do you create weather scenes and descriptions?
Changing Your Game’s Alignment
Alignment is one of those tricky substances that can make or break a game, and I have yet to meet someone who feels about and defines the alignments the same way as the next person. Here are some house rules you can implement your game to help make alignment run a bit more smoothly and feel more meaningful when it comes into.
Detecting alignment does not detect the alignment of anything that does not have the Evil/Good/Lawful/Chaotic/Whatever descriptor on it. It is, however, able to detect current intentions and thoughts, so that a person contemplating an evil act would show up to Detect Evil. This solves the problem of a lawful good society declaring it illegal to be evil and simply executing everyone who glowed red when Detect Evil was cast. Additional story lines may-be weaved in involving sleeper agents, a la the Manchurian Alignment.
Alignment detection only detects the alignment relative to the person detecting it, so that the detection will only detect evil/good/law/chaos as defined by the character. This creates more roleplaying opportunities and allows characters to be blinded by their prejudices, while simultaneously reducing the concreteness and definitiveness of alignments.
Allow players to declare no-alignment, meaning that they do not gain any alignment based DR and they are unable to overcome alignment based DR, or be the subject of any alignment based spells. Doing this causes alignment to become special again, and someone with a Good alignment or Lawful Good alignment is someone special and someone who is especially dedicated to those beliefs. An added benefit is that when doing this, sorting out the proper alignment for a character is far easier - if it is clear, then the alignment choice is easy, but if not then Null Alignment seems the best choice.
An additional benefit from implementing the two rules above is that it stops players from engaging in combat simply because of alignment, which stops a lot of mindless slaughtering and encourages actual roleplaying.
What house rules have you introduced to deal with alignment in your game?
